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The Shun Mook Affair Barry Willis

Las Vegas 1994
Stereophile, Vol.17 No.5, May 1994
Barry Willis

Nowhere does pseudotech parade more brazenly than down the high-end accessory highway. I turned up my BS detector and went searching for interesting stuff. Did I ever find it...

Shun Mook Audio's offerings were mind-boggling. In a welcome departure from technobabble, Shun Mook's literature makes no pretense of invoking the Western scientific tradition. Instead, it refers to the I Ching and hypes the mystical properties of the exotic hardwoods of which their products are made. If I understand correctly---and I'm…

The Shun Mook Affair BW page 2

That statement is not as stupid as it may seem---it's at the very core of the audiophile's fascination with music and the perceived characteristics of the devices that reproduce it. Belief and perception are two mutually dependent interactive variables---they feed and influence each other, and neither can be wholly separated from the other. If a baseball player believes that not washing his "lucky socks" will improve his batting average, then it will; his belief sets up a series of positive assumptions and expectations which will have a positive effect on his performance. He will wear those…

Krell Resolution 1 loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements

The size and weight of the Resolution 1 worked against my being able to raise it high into the air for the acoustic measurements. I therefore had to window the time-domain data more aggressively than usual to eliminate the interfering effects of a reflection from the floor between the speaker and the microphone. As a result, the measured response will have less midrange resolution than usual, though this does not interfere with the reliability of the measurements.

The big Krell's voltage sensitivity came in slightly below the specified 90dB/W/m, at 88.7dB/…

Down with Dynagroove!

Editor's Introduction: In 1963, Stereophile's founder J. Gordon Holt published attacks on what he saw as the single largest step backward in high-fidelity sound reproduction at that time: RCA's introduction of "Dynagroove" LP records, where the recorded signal was pre-distorted and dynamically equalized to compensate for the poor performance of cheap phonograph players. "Issue 5...revealed most of RCA Victor's 'revolutionary' new system as nothing more than a sophisticated way of bringing higher fi to record buyers who don't care enough about hi-fi to invest in a decent playback system." Ten…

Down with Dynagroove! Page 2

The Dynagroove system
RCA Victor terms their Dynagroove process "the most significant advance in the recording art since the introduction of the LP." Significant it may well be, but whether or not it is an advance is another question altogether.

In response to a telephoned query, RCA Victor's recording department filled us in on some details about their new Dynagroove recording process. Allowing for the possibility of some confusion on our part, here is the story we get.

In a nutshell, Dynagroove is a process for correcting automatically certain "inherent" deficiencies in…

Down with Dynagroove! Page 3

33 critics CAN be wrong (from Vol.1 No.5, May-June 1963)
We have watched with avid curiosity the reactions of the other hi-fi publications to the new RCA Victor Dynagroove system and, up to the time of this writing, we have yet to see any of them raise any serious questions about it (footnote 2). As a matter of fact, record critics appear to be almost unanimous in their praise of it, judging by the reviews we have seen, and by the critical accolades quoted in a brochure that RCA Victor is circulating.

RCA Victor's pamphlet cites reviewers in High Fidelity, Hi-Fi/Stereo Review, the…

Down with Dynagroove! Page 4

More dope on Dynagroove (from Vol.1 No.8, August 1964)
The April 1964 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society carried a detailed article by RCA's Dr. Harry F. Olson (footnote 3), which shed considerable new light on the controversial RCA Victor Dynagroove system. On the basis of this, plus some other recent articles on the subject, The Stereophile is now obliged to retrench on one point with which we originally took issue, but we are even more firmly convinced that most of the other aspects of the system represent a giant backward step in the recording art.

The…

Down with Dynagroove! Letters

Letters on Dynagroove & JGH's Diatribe

Dynagroove denigrator
Sirs:
I have read the Dynagroove ads; I have heard the commercials; I have read the press releases (and the counter-press releases); I have tuned in FM stereo broadcasts of these discs; I have watched their effect on a pair of matched and calibrated 4½" VU meters.

I have listened carefully and with an open mind. And I have formed my conclusion.

So long as this process remains in use by RCA Victor, I will never, repeat, never buy another of their records.

I am sorry for my local record store…

Meridian DSP8000 digital active loudspeaker

Nestled south of the North Downs in England's southeast, the Kentish dormitory town of Sevenoaks is about as sleepy a place as you can imagine. Yet 20 years ago, in the unlikely circumstances of the back room of a Sevenoaks pub, I witnessed the world of consumer loudspeakers changing. Meridian's Steve Hopkins was showing a pair of the company's active M2 loudspeakers connected directly to a 101 preamplifier.

The idea of integrating the power amplifier into the loudspeaker was not new in the pro audio world even then—in my days as a musician in the 1970s, I had become used to seeing…

Meridian DSP8000 digital active loudspeaker Page 2

All of the digital adjustments are available from the Meridian System Remote. The processed digital datastreams for each speaker's drive-unit feeds are sent to four 24-bit/192kHz delta-sigma D/A chips, the outputs of which drive the power-amplifier modules. Five separate bipolar amplifiers are used in each speaker: three 150W amps each drive a pair of woofers, while two 100W modules drive the tweeter-and-midrange unit. According to Meridian's downloadable literature on the '8000, these low-feedback amplifiers offer "extremely low noise, high detail, and fast bass" due to "the combination of…